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Grapes of Wrath Redux?
Sacramento, California's jobless tent city

David Seaton's News Links

What is happening? Where are we headed?

Regular News Links readers may recall that I have always maintained that Bush was merely a symptom of a systemic problem, not really a cause.

Barack Obama, it is obvious to me, is a treatment of the symptoms and not any cure for the underlying causes. Simply the re-branding of a defective product.

Obama's apparent strategy in Afghanistan confirms my impression that he is the lampedusian, "change everything, so that nothing changes" figure I have always suspected.

Pakistan, not Afghanistan is the real problem. A stable, un-threatened and prosperous Pakistan would act like a Valium on the whole region.

Stabilizing Pakistan should be the first priority and this does not seem to be the case... far from it.

If the globalized, world economy were doing well, perhaps stabilizing Pakistan would be "doable", but with emerging nations taking the worst hit in this crisis, such an "unlikely lad" as Pakistan is probably not going to make it... in most part due to American meddling... With absolutely catastrophic consequences.

I am afraid that the Obama policy in Afghanistan/Pakistan is not only incorrect, it is frivolous. Not because Obama himself is particularly frivolous, but because the system itself within which he operates is.

I think that because it is so painful, we are taking all of this much more seriously then it deserves to be.

I imagine that if I were a Martian observing this situation from the comfort of my flying saucer I would be peeing my space suit with laughter.

Lucky Martians!

Because it is painful, because so many are suffering we imagine that those in charge are motivated by great or noble passions.

Perhaps all of this is much simpler that it might appear at first glance.

The Geithner plan only confirms that analysis/intuition for me.

Most independent observers both in the USA and abroad are of the opinion that the problem with US banks is not liquidity, but rather solvency. That is why Paul Krugman, for example, "despairs" of Geithner's plan.

The normal game plan for bringing insolvent banks back to health is well known and goes as follows:

• Government takes over insolvent bank
• Fires old management
• Hires new managers
• Shareholders are wiped out
• Bank is restored to health and reprivatized often at a profit for taxpayers.

I think it is obvious that the shareholders of American banks are taking priority over the taxpayers. I seem to remember that one percent of the US population holds some forty percent of the shares traded on Wall Street.

Therefore it might be worthwhile to begin to investigate the relationship that Obama and his team have with said shareholders.

What if they were all in on the gag?

Think about three of the points of a bank restructuring that I made above:

• Fires old management
  
• Hires new managers
  
• Shareholders are wiped out

What is the relation of Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Tim Geitner to the "old management"? Would they or any of their family be "wiped out" in a normal nationalization/re-privatization process?

I think that these are serious questions that all nasty "populists" should be asking.

Finally:

What little comfort can we derive from this crisis?

Well, for one thing it puts paid to the idea of some sort of diabolically clever "capitalist-international" elite that guides mankind's destiny pulling strings from the shadows: the "Davos cum Bilderberg" thing.

Obviously any such group would have prevented this Wall Street, Madoff-make-off, which is threatening the whole system.

Nobody is minding the store, the American economy is simply a thieves' banquet.

We take our comfort where we can. DS